"the internet was a gift economy, like burning man: people giving away things of value to all comers because if you don't do that maybe it's because you can't. the good parts of it still are"
But it feels like more and more are taken over by money from advertisement. It is allways a relieve to me, find a site in the old spirit.
I'm old and fortunate enough to have gotten on the Internet in 1993, when it was smaller, more communal, and less commercial. As much as we old-timers lament the direction things have gone, there are still corners of the Internet where people still help each other, where people seek to share their knowledge freely, and help other humans, even strangers, without regard to artificial reputational or commercial gain. You just have to seek them out.
i only lament some things; others have gotten better. there's enormously more free software and better information, and disks are big enough for kiwix to be a thing. consider: wikipedia, openstreetmap, library genesis, sci-hub, the internet archive, bitcoin, stack exchange, tor, debian, termux, f-droid, and lineageos. heck, even firefox is noticeably better than lynx was when i joined the internet!
and, as i alluded to in my comment, it's not clear that people were ever purely altruistic; artificial reputational gain was always a consideration
Bitcoin can come off that list - it's real estate trading for people who can't grasp real estate trading. Cool concept when it was invented, but its net effect has been rather negative, serving to further concentrate wealth.
i don't agree, but that's probably just because you don't know what you're talking about, which is probably because you're here to do ideological battles instead of share knowledge
to post an actual argument rather than just the one-line shallow dismissals you're here for, several of the other items on the list depend on bitcoin to survive. several others will start to depend on it as soon as they are banned in the usa, probably after the next major terrorist incident. and, in my actual experience, the people who benefit most from bitcoin (and cryptocurrencies) on a personal level are impoverished venezuelans supported by family remittances from abroad despite economic sanctions by the usa
more broadly, the reason the internet is good is that sharing knowledge is a positive-sum game: the social benefit that results from sharing what you know is far greater than the cost of doing so, while it's comparatively more difficult for bad actors to do harm by spreading misinformation. it's not that nobody vandalizes wikipedia; it's that undoing and blocking vandalism is easier than the vandalism itself. this makes it possible to collaborate effectively on a wider scale than the social scaling of dunbar's number permits
unlike knowledge, though, some things are zero-sum, like the ownership of computers and houses, and the allocation of human effort to competing goals. as it turns out, having 'money', an impartial way to keep score in voluntary transactions regarding those things, is also publicly beneficial, because such 'markets' also permit collaboration on a wider scale than the social scaling of dunbar's number. money and sharing of knowledge have different strengths, so we cannot simply replace one with the other
the dramatic irony of this bears repeating: having an impartial institution for zero-sum transactions is a positive-sum outcome
a problem with money systems so far has been that they mostly depend on a central authority to regulate the money supply. this opens many vulnerabilities to the abuse of that power; the money in my pocket today buys a quarter of what it bought a year and a half ago, for example, evidently because a disproportionate expansion of the money supply made our domestic inflation here the worst in the world. and, when russia invaded ukraine, 300 billion dollars of its overseas reserves were confiscated by ukraine's allies, who were in a position to do so because they controlled the international money system—a power which, though used justly in this case, is too great to be entrusted to any potential belligerent in future international conflicts
on a smaller scale, in 02022, the canadian government froze the bank accounts of people suspected but not convicted of donating to fund a protest against some of the government's domestic policies, the so-called 'trucker's strike'. in this case, in the end, the government backed down and returned the money, but it's another clear case of structural vulnerabilities in the current money system
cryptocurrencies make it possible to have money without these vulnerabilities
when bitcoin appeared, i thought this would probably destroy civilization. now i think civilization is doing a fine job of that on its own despite cryptocurrencies slowing the collapse
Thanks, you have really raised the quality bar for discussion by combing through another user's comments and cherry-picking ones you don't like. Especially complaining about comments on political posts being political. And complaining about the same thread multiple times is chef's kiss.
The rest of your comment was only added an hour after the comment was originally posted, presumably because you realised in hindsight you were doing the thing you were complaining about. It was a good start, but you should have deleted the old comment instead of appending to it.
Brief commentary on the appended content: the blockchain rules constitute a state (as in a country/government/central authority) and it's good that there's a way to take money away from criminals, actually. Even cryptocurrency people agree, since Ethereum even forked itself to cancel a criminal's transaction once, and the post-fork chain is massively more popular.
It's simple selfishness - the people with authority to choose to fork had much more money post-fork, so they chose to fork and take the money away from criminals. In other circumstances, they are the ones having money taken away by the government, so they choose to not fork or design protocols in ways that help the government get money. No moral position is involved.
I don't agree with your assertion that pointing out that you're here to do ideological battles instead of share knowledge is the same thing as me being here to do ideological battles instead of share knowledge. I didn't have to cherry-pick anything; virtually all of your comments over the previous 48 hours when I posted that comment fit that description.
The context of your continuous hate-driven behavior, in egregious violation of both the site rules and basic norms of healthy discourse, is important information for anyone else reading the thread.
No, we cryptocurrency people don't agree. It's actually hard to get them to agree on anything. Even whether it should be under state control or not.
Labelling the ethereum fork (I assume you are speaking of the DAO) as criminal is interesting. They simply executed the contract according to the terms of code which isn't necessarily illegal. At the time, ETH was a hundredth of its current size (losing 1/3rd its value on the contract) and considered an extinction level event. The other cryptos were innovating at a rapid rate to make "the next bitcoin" and could well have surpassed ETH in market cap.
Objectively unethical, subjectively criminal activity. In 2016, it was unregulated software code during a "code is law" mentality. The regulatory agencies hadn't caught up (the IRS had laid claim in 2014 then revised in 2019).
Yes, similar reasons would justify taking your fiat away. I do sympathize with the Ethereum Classic crowd and generally agree with the code is law idea. The investors very well knew the risks.
Central control of money supply is a good thing. It helps avoid counterfeiters. It also helps make sure that we are broadly using the same means of exchange.
Crypto moves control from the state to whoever runs the tech stack or has cheap enough power to mine crypto. Which in many places is still … checks notes … the state!
Had Russia kept its reserves in Bitcoin or any other crypto, I am skeptical that the clever finance ministries of Europe and America would be unable to reach them. Moreover, the holders of these reserves haven’t sold them. They’re holding them to secure other financing for Ukraine. Which is honestly what anyone does with money they hold - they use it to invest and generate revenue.
An integrated financial world makes armed conflict more costly by threatening a belligerent’s access to markets. That is a good thing and why blockades (i.e sanctions) can be effective in shortening or ending a conflict.
your argument about 'central control of money supply' is exactly backwards. the problem with 'counterfeiters', if we look only at the facts and avoid the question-begging derogatory term, is that they can print money while providing nothing in return; that's exactly what a mint printing paper money does, as do other entities with central control of the money supply. so, far from avoiding counterfeiters, it officially licenses them. you could as well say that stand-your-ground laws help avoid murder because the killings they permit are not murder, since the law permits them
most states are unwilling to allow a foreign power to print unlimited amounts of the money they use, because this would represent a major concession of sovereignty. this ensures that almost no two countries use the same means of exchange
your argument about who has control has more merit. but you're overlooking structural differences; it's like saying that democracy moves control from the king to whoever is popular enough to get votes, or that freedom of speech moves control from the ministry of truth to whoever has enough money to run a printing press. the structural differences prevent cryptocurrency miners and exchanges like coinbase from simply inflating bitcoin into worthlessness the way my local currency has been inflated over the last year. the most extreme event we've seen along those lines was ethereum's controversial unwinding of the dao theft; nothing similar has ever happened in bitcoin, and probably nothing similar will happen in the future in ethereum or zcash
it is definitely true that russia could not have kept its reserves in bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency, because the market capitalization of bitcoin was far too small to provide 300 billion dollars of liquidity if it had to sell off those reserves. that is probably still true and may possibly remain true forever. but you can bet your life that every head of state who saw that confiscation is formulating a strategy to ensure it won't happen to them; that will have the opposite effect on financial integration from the one you want
i'm skeptical about your integration thesis, though, partly because it was very popular in 01914, and partly because of the limited repercussions from the usa's completely unprovoked invasion of iraq in 02003. (arguably the invasion of the ukraine is one of those repercussions, but that hardly seems like a major disincentive to future us presidents who find tempting countries to invade!)
I'm skeptical that Bitcoin's value is strongly related in any way to Tether. The larger meta-Bitcoin point, though, is that although nobody can print Bitcoin at will (because it's open and auditable, unlike the printing of dollars) anybody can create their own cryptocurrency and print that.
On the other hand, everybody knows that, so Bitcoin's so-called "market cap" is several times bigger than that of all the other cryptocurrencies put together.
Whatever assets you keep with custodians abroad while invading a neighboring country might not be safe, irrespective if that asset is paper cash, gold, bitcoins, luxury yachts or anything else. That tells us nothing about the assets themselves, and only a little bit about how international law is practiced.
well, the specific reason bitcoin is better than gold for this purpose is that you don't have to keep it with custodians abroad in order to sell it easily. right now a more important reason that it's worse—unusably bad, in fact—is that its so-called market capitalization is too small, and the markets backing it too thinly traded, for the reserves of any country but a fairly small or poor one
that might change, but for the time being, central banks of the world are somewhat adrift in the wake of this unprecedented action
How is that different from gold? I believe central banks keeps that around for precisely that reason. Or, for that matter, the difference from paper cash or luxury yachts? All you need is to find a buyer.
Which might not be easy for yachts, and maybe not for bitcoins for the reasons you mention, but shouldn't be too hard for gold or cash. For central banks, bitcoins should be pretty similar to other assets.
(This made me curious, but I couldn't find any reference to whether any central banks are known to own it.)
generally to sell gold you either need to ship it to somebody, which poses the risk of it being stolen, lost in transit, or interdicted when crossing a border, or you need to have previously deposited it in a warehouse approved by the commodities exchange that you are trading it on, which involved shipping it to the warehouse. lme has 465 of them https://www.lme.com/Sustainability-and-Physical-Markets/Ware...
commodity metals like gold can change hands many times before ever leaving the warehouse, and so some fraction of the metals purportedly in those warehouses don't actually exist, having been stolen years earlier—an eventuality normally handled by insurance
consequently a very large fraction of the world's non-british central bank gold reserves are actually physically located in london
what's not covered by insurance is having your assets frozen by a foreign court that has jurisdiction over the warehouse 'your' metals happen to be in; historically this was not considered a plausible scenario in reliable countries, but then it happened, and now, as i understand it, nobody knows what to do. keeping your reserves in warehouses under your own jurisdiction doesn't solve the problem; it just transfers the risk to whoever you're trading with
with bitcoin, no shipping or warehousing is needed, so these risks are replaced with subtler risks related to information security
in this imf note from january https://www.imf.org/-/media/Files/Publications/IMF-Notes/202... the possibility of adopting cryptocurrencies as a new class of international reserve assets is discussed, though that's not really the main point of the note. in general central bankers are extremely skeptical of cryptocurrencies, especially decentralized ones. the world bank helpfully issued a communiqué on its blog last week, entitled, 'crypto-assets: unfit for central bank reserves today' https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/allaboutfinance/crypto-assets... which mostly echoes what i've said earlier in this thread
so i would be surprised if there was any adoption of cryptocurencies as international reserve assets yet
been looking for a while. But my hobbies are either too niche or these groups aren't in the public eye to begin with. I guess that's the other issue: more of these remaining bastions are retreating off the indexable web at best to minimize spam management and at worst to avoid having all their data scraped without consent.
Much of the (true) "open source" movement / community is still all about that mentality / spirit. Much of the "hacker" / Maker crowd, too. So much of what made the early Internet great still lives on in later generations who keep that spirit alive and continue to share it with others.
People were running adsense and Amazon affilates in 2004. I visited many websites who would let you spin a wheel and send you a check if you won. Browsers would pay you to surf. Money was a big factor and you would have to go pre dot.com or the bbs world to find it. Geocities had ads. Punch the monkey was everywhere.
Google was, ironically, a reaction to how heavily ad-laden Altavista was.
Russ Alberry's famous rant about spam ruining USENET was 1998: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/writing/rant.html and should be required reading for anyone trying to build a decentralized communication system.
> pre dot.com or the bbs world to find it
That was indeed where the good stuff was (and some of the bad stuff; BBS culture could be flamey and cliquey as well as welcoming). It was so good that an entire generation of people keep trying to build it over and over again, such as bluesky, mastodon, and the deceased cohost.
Yes, check All Advantage. It was a browser addon showing you add while you were browsing. I remember receiving a check from them (adressed to my mother obviously) when I was a teen.
i was on the internet in 01992: before adsense, before monkey punchers, before geocities, before amazon, but not before dot-com, as my references to lynx and the nsf should have told you. money was a big factor but not in the way you are describing
same year for me. I have such fond memories of those few years where you could just scour through university FTPs and websites for hours, finding so much cool (and informative) stuff. It felt like getting a peek into so many worlds I knew nothing about, and it felt limitless (especially as I was a kid at the time). Indeed, the openness and "generosity" of people online in those days set such a good example for me, that I try to "pay forward" in my daily actions and work.
kagi is explicitly not a community; it's a service you pay for. it's organized around a them/us distinction, and the users are the (atomized) outgroup, individually paying the ingroup for the service provided by that ingroup
there is nothing wrong with that; it's a perfectly good way of organizing things. but it's important not to confuse it with the relationship between, for example, linux users, any of whom is free at any moment to improve the kernel for everyone
I think you misinterpreted what I was saying. Kagi is indeed a paid service and not a community. I was saying it has a way to find small web type sites, but lamenting the fact that part of what made those sites so useful in the past was a tiny community, is gone, and probably not coming back.
That's exactly why it should be a community. Being willing to pay a monthly fee for a search engine sets a higher bar for affluence and caring about the web. So I wish they would do something like create a "Kagi Web" search engine that just consists of their websites, since I'm sure Kagi users have interesting things to say.
It feels to me like the old lovingly curated and crafted internet sites are being pillaged and displaced by a wave of AI regurgitations — with the cheerleading of "information wants to be free" advocates.
I had a discussion around this with a friend a few days ago.
They saw it as a bad thing.
But to me it's the same as before : what I decide to share on the Internet is for everyone.
If someone find a way to make money with it, it's probably because they made it more easy to find or use for users (customers), so good on them!
As someone who relies on AI quite often to work on new topics, I'm fully aware that what I get is the result of someone else's content being digested by an LLM.
With Kagi's Assistant I even got the sources if I want to access it.
If I publish some niche content that is fed to an LLM and then just one person got the answer to their problem through the LLM instead of finding my website through an ad-ridden search engine, I'm more than happy, I helped someone!
But it feels like more and more are taken over by money from advertisement. It is allways a relieve to me, find a site in the old spirit.