The Death of Decentralized Email
A historical review of the multi-decade centralization and capture of the email protocol.
Interesting history and analysis of SMTP's history. How can we prevent fedi and other open protocols from suffering the same fates?
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I know there are problems with big email providers subverting decentralisation to benefit their business models, and throttling mail from independent or self-hosted domains. But I couldn't take the analysis seriously past this statement:
You may know me as a Bitcoin educator and engineer.
Yeah well, in that case, fuck you and the hypercapitalist horse you rode in on.
"Sent from my iPhone"
I hate this meme vehemently
I think you might be 180° missing the point of the meme
Probably, my media literacy is at an all time low, like the rest of the US. The microplastics, social-media induced ADHD, and antipsychotics have turned me into a gibbering mess.
It's an ungoogled Android actually, but I can see how that ruins your joke 🙂
well to be fair bitcoin is on point as a decentralized currency.
You may know me as a Bitcoin educator and engineer.
Yeah well, in that case, fuck you and the hypercapitalist horse you rode in on.
This guy is a protocol engineer, talking about protocols. You may not like like Bitcoin, but it's pretty hard to argue it's not one of the most successful, widely-used, and forked open source protocols developed in the last several decades. Bitcoin core is in the top 100 starred repos on Github. It has a unicode character.
Bitcoin's market cap (> 1 trillion USD) is bigger than Sweden's GDP and it moves billions of dollars around the world every year. You can use it to send money to anybody with a phone and a halfway reliable internet connection in under a second for pennies in fees, and it settles instantly. And it's been working for 15 years without a single hour of downtime, bank holiday, or hack despite pandemics, wars, financial crises, and attempted bans by global powers.
Like, be mad if you want, but it's a pretty successful and robust protocol. And if you don't like it, you can fork it and change it, because it's open source.
http, https, ssh, ntp, ftp. These are all algorithms some of us use every day. Bitcoin is a protocol, true, but it's not a good one. And it's one that most people have not used, and don't intend to
It has a lot of forks? that is neither here nor there. it's a tech buzzword. of course there are going to be a lot of forks. Do any of them actually go anywhere though? not really
God damn bitcoin >> SSH?? (1999)
That's a pretty steamy take if I've ever heard one
@Sethayy nobody made that take...
'One of the most successful, widely used, and forked protocols'
SSH is also a protocol, tho I'll admit maybe its 'one of the few' above bitcoin - but I can come up with a page of examples that top it if you need (HTTP, TCP, UDP, RTSP, RGMII...)
@Sethayy cool, go ahead. But still nobody made that take, so ... you are arguing with the wind.
What take then cause I don't got all day to chase your goalposts and I'm already tired of it
No, see — if I dont like it I don't need to fork it. I can just leave it and all its forks the hell alone. I'd do the same for national currencies if I could, cryptocurrencies are just the same bullshit without the regulatory checks and balances.
TL;DR — I see what you're selling and I'm not buying it.
Bitcoin is hypercapitalist? A decentralized value store not controlled by any one country and immune to money printing inflation? What are you smoking?
Bitcoin is more widely seen as a vehicle for speculation rather than a decentralized currency. Unlucky.
just like email.
I mean, it's been shown that it's relatively easy for a big company to control the price of Bitcoin, and there's nothing more capitalist than wanting to get away from the control of countries and states that might get in the way of making as much profit as possible so,,,, yeah no I'd say hypercapitalist is a valid accusation. Bitcoin was designed to beat the big banks and capitalist status-quo, but I don't think that we can pretend it succeeded anymore.
Its like China calling itself communist, like sure maybe its 0.1% more than ultra capitalist US, but both they're both shit
No tech is perfect. And the current bitcoin is not the same as the original client. It has been modified to allow for abuse and control. The fact that we allow this to take place is more a reflection of our governments aiming to control it than any inherent property of the currency.
Big banks would have far less control if you couldn’t print sanctioned currency to buy as much bitcoin as they want to play with the value set by sanctioned exchanges.
I agree that bitcoin is capitalist like most monetary bills in a free market. I disagree it’s more capitalist than what we have now. It’s just being propagandized and veiled from the underlying technology to make it seem so.
Capitalists will even sell you communism if it makes them a dime, end result is cryptocurrency is half assed solving a problem that doesn't really exist.
Like inflation is a great example, you shouldnt have to add modifiers onto its definition, inflation is inflation - bitcoin by design must inflate
By design, it will slowly stop inflating at the snails pace it does vs unpegged paper currency.
A central bank regulating where money is printed and to whom it’s distributed at what contrived rates is horrifying. It’s also the default in most of the world.
You can trade bitcoin and use it as a currency in a non-capitalist market. The fact that it has been abused and traded into stratospheric value is a result of manipulation, sanctioned exchanges, and propaganda.
Bitcoin just allows you to write debits and credits on a distributed, verified, ledger. That’s it really. How the market is regulated is on the people, not the technology. There is nothing inherently capitalist about the technology other than allowing any individual to trade value with another in a free market manner. You would be trying to escape supply and demand dynamics to remove that “capitalist” aspect of it.
The power draw on the other hand.. the first imagining of a digital decentralized and distributed currency was bound to have some problems.
Snails pace??
You wanna take a 2 second peek at the value of bitcoin over the past decade (over 7 years bitcoin is about 3000%, USD is approximately 32% over 10)
Banks do suck but there's absolutely no reason rich people can't manipulate bitcoin - maybe even easier than traditional money.
Put your money in gold or something that actually exists instead of an imaginary number that's limited in supply
That value was increased initially through usage as countries adopted ATMs and online retailers accepted bitcoin. This obviously reduced the supply due to increased demand. Then the speculators started buying it up making it even more scarce.
It has a fixed amount. It’s normal to rise in value as it becomes more useful for either transacting, holding value, or making money through speculation. You can’t compare it to a 300 year old dollar which was unpegged from gold and has the US economy/government backing it now.
The dollar is also manipulated, but the effects are less pronounced due to the sheer amount in circulation around the world. Some of the effects are also thrown on other economies through the Forex markets too. If bitcoin were as ubiquitous as the $, it wouldn’t be easy to manipulate either. It’s like having your own coin with only 100 physical coins in circulation. All someone has to do is buy a bunch and refuse to sell and the value rises for the uninformed.
