Most crypto currencies don't and probably never will. But those such as Bitcoin that are the most decentralized and censorship resistant are crucial to those living under authoritarian regimes and whose currencies are going through significant debasement. The mad rush to make a quick buck and the propaganda from those in power have distorted the original intent behind crypto.
Also, corporations such as Nvidia that depends on the good will of the government are motivated to fall in line with the government's stance, which is negative given the threat it poses to the power and control they maintain having USD as the world reserve currency.
That's just the problem. It's very popular with people who want to bypass the law. Occasionally that's crucial and laudable. Usually it's drugs and illegal pornography. Which makes its use for anything legal dubious.
If it ever could have broken that stigma, the swarm of speculators and scammers made that impossible.
Is the law always correct? Specifically in totalitarian countries? The internet is also a tool for braking the law with unrestricted information. Bitcoin is unrestrained money. All the bitcoin copycats controlled by individuals are scams tho
It doesn't have to be anonymous to be censorship resistant or useful in those environments. It takes more work, sure, but it's not a must-have property of the system in order to be resistant to censorship.
Read a big story about people setting up illicit mining farms in Venezuela (?), using the proceeds to buy goods and have them shipped to them, providing sustenance to those in their community. Unfortunately the government realized the dilapidated grid was hemmorhaging power in the area, tracked them down, and shut it all down.
It doesn't seem like Bitcoin, etc. are widely used enough to be crucial to a society such as you describe. And I have a hard time imagining how they could become so, given the difficulty in converting that society's standard currency to cryptocurrency.
That is such a small user base and governments have already shown they can confiscate crypto of they think it's a priority. The main use I see is in the midst of currency crisis, but that is fairly rare.
You want to fire up a Mastodon server because I presume you're concerned with the loss of free speech on that platform? Do you think it was free prior to Elon's acquisition? Or are you only concerned about one particular type of speech when it comes to free speech?
This guy lost me after listing his biases. If your approach or the technology requires you to work at that low of a level, then we're doing something wrong. We should be abstracting complexity away, not depending on being knowledgeable of the inner working of things, like browser specific tricks (unless necessary).
Who do you think is going to successfully abstract complexity, if not the people knowledgeable of the inner workings of the underlying platform?
Those people age and die, as well; Don't want to find ourselves in the position of high abstraction that nobody living understands anymore. Therefore it's vital to the health of the techosystem that some people approach it from the bottom up.
All abstractions are leaky, some more, some less. Knowing what stands behind the abstraction is usually very helpful, even when most of the time using the abstraction you don't have to think about it.
I say pick your battles, some things you use way more than others understanding the inner workings of your most used is very helpful, you cannot know it all!
The solution is simple. The platforms should take full advantage of the protections granted by Section 230, while designing the platform to support pluggable 3rd party moderation. You don't want to see Nazi posts, or have them reply to your tweets? Opt for a moderator that provides that. Third party moderators could even supplement content, particularly those that go viral, with fact checking or contrary views as chosen by the user.
Will people still opt for no or biased moderation and be susceptible to fake news? Certainly, but with some tweaking, proper incentives, and quality trusted moderation, it would be enough to improve discourse and fact finding compared to what we have now, which is one dominating group controlling what we think and see.
How much did everyone using Firefox pay for the privilege of using their browser? It's ironic to me that there is so much anger over a communist China ad, while at the same time they want to benefit from the hard work of others for free. TANSTAAFL people.
that would be a valid point if mozilla wasn't getting half a billion (?) a year from google and its remarkably incompetent CEO wasn't getting paid 3 million a year after having given herself a big raise while the only product that makes mozilla money is bleeding users.
It still served a purpose of true.