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The Death of Decentralized Email (blog.lopp.net)

submitted 4 months ago by makeasnek@lemmy.ml to c/opensource@lemmy.ml

53 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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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[–] makeasnek@lemmy.ml 6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de 10 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

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

[–] halm@leminal.space 3 points 4 months ago

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.