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?
And it seems they require KYC only when you try to pay out funds? This sounds like a great way to make some money only to find out you can't actually get your hands on it later...
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.
That implies that using linux doesn't have you still beholden to a black box which is controlled by 2 US companies, when most likely you're still using an X86 Intel or AMD processor. But let's say you're using some ARM chip instead. Now your black box was built by TSMC or Samsung instead. It's black boxes all the way down.
Essentially the entirety of modern humanity is built on black boxes. I'd like to find one person who knows exactly what and where every single component on their motherboard is and why it is there, the precise transistor layout of every chip from the GPU and CPU down to the tiniest microcontrollers, and every single instruction that is running on their computers at any time.
Sure, you can run Linux, but it still is running on a closed-source CPU. For all we know (unlikely as it is), Intel-AMD CPUs could have a backdoor saying 'hey, send the instruction and data cache to the network controller and to this IP address'. These CPUs still have proprietary microcode.
That is what is really appealing about some of those retro computer kits where you get a ziplock bag full of parts and PCB and need to solder them together. I feel like I'll understand the hardware on a new level. I hope the Commander X16 ends up offering this option.
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.
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?
I wonder how much corporate domain blocking comes into play on articles like this gaining traction on HN during the day on weekdays? I am reading the comments here on my lunch break before reading the article since "gaming" links are blocked. If it sounds interesting, I try to look it up after work.
People may be downvoting because I stuffed my comment with opinions they dislike more so than my calling out the title being irrelevant to the article.
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.
It's been 14 years, billions in investment and roughly speaking zero non-criminal usage and no real-world killer use cases. That's just fact. Time to move on.
Thank you for succinctly saying what takes me multiple paragraphs.
One nitpick - it’s easily $10s of billions of in investment, more than likely approaching or surpassing $100s of billions.
A16Z alone has raised roughly $10b. Throw in other big VCs, a bunch of coin/crypto specific funds, likely thousands or tens of thousands of angel/seed rounds we’ve never heard of capitalizing on the hype (or just outright frauds), initial coin allocations (the Ethereum foundation alone had over $1b last I looked), etc, etc. Then there’s trying to figure how to “value” “investment” in things like ICOs and ICO 2.0 stuff like NFTs, etc.
Not to mention the tendency for crypto projects to be outright frauds from the start. OneCoin alone brought in $4b in what could be characterized as “investment” from the perspective of the victims. One incomplete analysis[0] shows this specific category of frauds (of which there are many in crypto) to be at least $26b in total.
It’s been 14 years, hundreds of billions in investment and roughly speaking zero non-criminal usage and no real-world killer use cases. That’s just fact. Time to move on.
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.
> Does it follow that tulips, railroad companies, and baby plushies are scams and criminal in nature?
At the time that those things were happening? Definitely scams. Not necessarily criminal, though.
> It doesn't care if grifters hype, pump, and dump its tokens.
True. But, as I think you've noticed, a whole lot of people do care, and don't want to have anything to do with the whole idea. Maybe even most people.
It doesn't help that pro-cryptocurrency people cannot articulate a real, practical use case (outside of one or two niche things, like moving money across contested national borders) that isn't already done at least as well by the existing monetary system and also isn't scammy.
In attempting to calculate a total for "investment" in the ecosystem my criteria is whether or not the investor considered it an investment.
Consider Theranos as a non-crypto example. Fraud, yes, with two people convicted under those charges. Holmes was charged with defrauding investors and not convicted on those counts (IIRC). Balwani was.
I think it's relatively safe to say the parallel between people investing in what ended up being a bubble, fraud, etc (from tulips on) was considered as investment from the source of funds - the investors. It's why they call it "speculative investment". Speculative but investment nonetheless. Any early money on moonshot tech companies could be characterized the same way. Just turns out for Facebook, Google, etc it worked out because the founders and team weren't defrauding from the start, executed well, etc. It helps that the fundamental premise of these companies didn't go against human nature and demonstrated tremendous value and therefore significant user adoption from day 1.
Where it gets more complicated is going back to the original argument - money poured into the space for what ostensibly should have been work to legitimately further the ecosystem. Frankly I'm not entirely sure how to characterize it but the other issue here are situations like FTX (which I didn't include or mention). They did a lot of legitimate work for a while. How would this be accounted for in this distinction? What about companies like Coinbase that have had wildly swinging valuations? The other scary thing - what about companies/projects/etc that have taken investment but just haven't collapsed yet (due to outright fraud or otherwise)?
So... Very complex scenario but I think it's safe to say the core point remains - there's been a ton of money, effort, and time (over the course of 14 years) committed to this space with essentially nothing to show in the real world. I've spent a lot of time analyzing on chain data and at best there are MAYBE 100m crypto "users" worldwide. If we say $100b of investment that's a user acquisition cost of $1000 - and investors can't even fully capitalize on those users due to the decentralized nature of crypto. Hell, let's call if $50b of non-fraud "legit" investment. That's still $500/user which is at least one order of magnitude beyond anything you see in the non-crypto space.
If the entire crypto space was a tech startup funded by VCs they would have cut their loses, exited years ago, and crypto would essentially be back at the "investment" model of early Bitcoin (which IMO is perfectly fine and even preferred by many). Even the early web investment period (with the 2000 bubble burst) saw enough successes and returns within the span of a decade (1995-2005) to keep the money pouring in (and returning) to this day.
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.
Triple A is a crypto payments company with much more self-interest than those of us who are skeptical towards crypto. The base methodology for all of their statistics is ridiculous: "Let's take a cherry-picked dubious survey of crypto adoption done by the Bank of Canada and extrapolate those numbers to the entire world POPULATION". Bonus points for their "creativity" with this methodology - worldwide population is roughly 8 billion while internet users (the real TAM for crypto) is closer to 5 billion. So already you need to shave at least 35% off their numbers.
Their baseline "420m crypto users worldwide" estimate (which is already bad considering TAM is > 5 billion internet users) can be easily debunked to at least 1/3 of that number (100m - which is still incredibly optimistic) by spending an hour looking at block explorers across the top 10 chains (evaluating daily/monthly transaction counts, tx/rx address pairs actually used for daily/monthly transactions, etc). When I last did it to get to the 100m number I was VERY fair to crypto - round up everywhere, assume address = user (it doesn't), count each address as a unique user per chain, etc. If crypto had anything resembling the legit DAU/MAU metrics you see from publicly traded companies the total for the entire crypto space would likely be closer to 50m (or less).
I'm always fascinated by this - crypto advocates constantly talk about the transparency, openness, etc provided by blockchain while simultaneously touting those absurd Triple-A statistics. You will never see them do a real (yet still easy) analysis like I have because the real numbers look terrible.
If there was any real interest in the crypto ecosystem succeeding crypto enthusiasts would take a real hard look at the real stats, acknowledge they have a problem with adoption, and try to fix it. They're just too personally invested financially and thus spend their time "pumping their bags".
I doubt a FAANG or other non-crypto employee is worried in the slightest by the "threat" of an entire ecosystem that has acquired a whopping 50m-100m users over 14 years.
> 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.
Simply owning digital tokens is not a real world usage of those tokens, full stop.
That being said, I can fully accept that 5-25% of a countries population is gullible enough to buy cryptocurrency.
> 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.
> In many countries, it's the 75% of the population saving in their local fiat currency that are the gullible ones.
Nobody is supposed to save fiat except as a liquidity cushion against personal tail risk for which you pay the spread between interest rates and inflation. Nobody has ever advised people to save fiat anywhere. They advice is to keep an emergency savings account and invest the rest.
If talking shit about cryptocurrency is a more reliable job than supporting it, I'd argue its time to move on.
There was never a hope for Bitcoin replacing or even competing with regulated currencies. It had its fun in the sun, but now it (and just about every altcoin) will bleed their values from the layman's wallet while opportunists and whales exploit an already-broken economy. Depending on who you ask (or what chain you trade on) we're already there.
> 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.
It's a hobby, I promise :)
> 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.
In my role as a critic (or I suspect you'd say cynic) whether crypto succeeds or fails doesn't matter. If it finds a killer use case and makes my life better I win because my life is better. I'll be the first to use any technology that makes my life better, or the things I do faster or cheaper. As I am not invested, it doesn't hurt me if it fails. The stock I own is broadly agnostic to the success or failure of crypto and the idea that any FAANG company is under threat from crypto is silly. If it takes off, the FAANGs would quickly find a way to profit.
> Surely calling 5-25% of many countries' populations criminals (including the US), should be relegated to a fringe extremist view.
They're not using it, they're speculating on its price. That's not the same thing. To use it they'd have to be exchanging it for goods and services and they're simply not because it's a bad store of value and a worse medium of exchange.
The title of that page is "Cryptocurrency Ownership Data" not "Cryptocurrency Use Data."
In re your reply down the line:
> It's as much real world usage, as people owning stocks and precious metals is.
Stocks are productive investments because their appreciation is derived from non-investor participants. Crypto doesn't derive it's value from non-investor participants. Crypto is only re-arranging the wealth in fiat terms, distributing money from later entrants to earlier ones. A better analogy would be to other zero-sum products like options or futures contracts but of course those have use as a hedge against risk which oviously crypto does not as it's simply correlated to the bubble stocks in the NASDAQ.
It is a lot like owning gold (well, except that gold actually is used industrially) but generally owning shiny pebbles has been a fringe sport dominated by William Devane and his 2am coin commercials on Fox. I think gold is a silly investment too and I don't hear anyone selling it as the future of anything.
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)
Kinda, the benefit in the UAE is that the taxes are lower, but it's really company-dependent since you have fewer worker protections. I turned down a job offer there because it's so far away, so if you lost the job (see recent layoffs), it'd be a nightmare.
But Australia and Canada both have slightly better salaries too (just not US-level).
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.
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.
I use Zoho CRM. it's actually pretty good in terms of customization reliability and features. I used to maintain a SugarCRM CE instance for several years after they stop supporting the community edition.I Could no longer afford to spend the time to maintain it so I replaced it with ZohoCRM.
You're right about their Mail solutions though they're not that great.
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
It's no longer owned by Yahoo! but by Automattic (WordPress) now. As for decentralized, they've posted recently about their intent to support ActivityPub.
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.
