StartOS facilitates the entire process of discovering, installing, configuring, and using any variety of open-source software from anywhere in the world without trusting anyone.
I mean, that quote is truer for any regular currency than it is for shitcoin. The only unique thing about cryptocurrency (and especially POW ones) is that it's flushing the environment down the drain even quicker than bog standard hypercapitalism. And still you can't use your fucking monopoly money to buy a bottled water.
Well, except of course the entity that gave you the hardware. And the entity that preinstalled and/or gave you the OS image. And that that entity wasn't fooled into including malicious code in some roundabout way.
like it or not, there's currently no real way to use any significant amount of computing power without trusting someone. And usually several hundreds/thousands of someones.
The best you can hope for is to focus the trust into a small number of entities that have it in their own self interest to prove worthy of that trust.
Nobody is doing that now, with regular money, either.
I think it's more for ACH between banks as well as some banks have limits. Also, a government literally stepped in to actively block people's accounts. Just because you can swipe your card and buy a soda, doesn't mean there aren't restrictions or people being blocked.
Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said Thursday financial institutions have moved quickly to freeze the accounts of people linked to the demonstrations in Ottawa, leaving an unknown number of protesters in financial limbo
Well that's scary. Luckily I live nowhere near that part of the world.
But even if I have a server, I'll have to have my own separate Internet if I really want to be able to pay unrestrictedly. Otherwise the government would just shut down my internet connection, right?
I really like the idea of user-friendly selfhosting (which is essentially what this company is offering, I mean hell, I've had similar business ideas floating around in my head too) BUT any company that has:
an in-the-know marketing team
Any employees that are somewhat technical enough (which should be guaranteed for a company with this sort of product
NOT a scam
Would know what a HUGE risk reputation-wise it is to showcase crypto-related selfhosting on the FRONT page. It's like a "build-a-red-flag" or "destroy-our-reputation" speedrun. Even IF you want to offer this, anyone in-the-know with at least 3 braincells would bury this deep in the page and make it difficult to find (if they were well-intentioned in the first place) because at this point anything crypto, especially being the main offering, is a huge red flag.
If instead, they offered a nextcloud instance, for example, or Pihole as an adblocker, or some other good and common services, maybe a selfhosted VPN (or maybe not, because of the stupid and misleading ads of VPN companies), they would be seen as 100% more legit.
Edit: Just checked their marketplace and they have:
Jellyfin
Vaultwarden
FreeGPT-2
Gitea
Matrix
Nextcloud
Their own service for TOR pages
Ghost (a blogging platform)
SearxNG (a search engine)
I mean, add Wordpress, Pihole and some other friendly services, and advertise THOSE!!! Build your own Google (SearxNG)! Build your own MS Office online and OneDrive (Nextcloud)! Build your own Github (Gitea)! Build your own Discord (Matrix)! Build your own password manager (Vaultwarden)! Build your own Netflix (Jellyfin)!
True. Tipi, Umbrel and CasaOS are savvy enough to do this. But do you really want to teach more cryptobros to slip their message under the threshold? I'm fine that they show their true goals front and centre, it's like a note saying "hit me" taped to their backs.
On the contrary, it (the website) looks really nice.
The product, on the other hand, seems targeted towards "normies" and would probably do better in a place that doesn't have ppl already self hosting their stuff.