strypey

Debit cards aren't cash. They're credit cards that get instantly paid off from your bank account by direct debit. But you're right to laugh at the idea that cash is dead. In China, everyone who isn't using AliPay or WeChatPay (ie credit cards without the plastic card) is using cash. Yes, people use credit or debit cards a lot more often now, but paying with cash is very much still a thing.

> it performs some utility like companies do.

Pipes perform utilities, not companies. What companies do is manage the social and financial infrastructure around making, or delivering, or laying, or servicing pipes. See the difference? What Buffet is saying is that when people speculate on BitCoin, they're buying over-priced pipes, in the hopes that some other sucker will pay even more for the same pipes. The companies that will make money out of crypto-$ long term are the ones sell services (like the hoteliers and general store owners in the gold rush), not the ones spending money (or god forbid going into dept) to buy crypto-tokens. Those service companies can pivot to selling similar services to another sector if (when) the crypto bubble bursts. They are the ones the likes of Buffet consider an investment.

> Albert, another partner as USV has been evolving his understanding and has been working on a book called World After Capital

It's probably no reflection on the rest of his thesis, but he's wrong about what was scarce in pre-agrarian societies (see 'The Original Affluent Society by Marshall Sahlins). Looks like an intriguing book though, thanks for sharing. Seems similar to the thesis of Jeremy Rifkin's 'Third Industrial Revolution' and 'Zero Marginal Cost Society' books.

As for your worst-case-scenario about crypto-currencies, replace them with over-valued real estate and we've already seen it play out at least once. The majorities (or 40% minorities in my country) who vote for fiscally conservative parties pushing austerity policies, despite all the evidence they make the problem worse not better, are desperately trying to prop up the value of their real estate investments and retirement funds. Like goldbugs and bitcoinbugs, they have an irrational fear and hatred of even mild inflation, as any inflation causes some erosion of the value of their stored wealth. This fear and hatred makes them willing to ignore the acid that austerity pours of the social fabric, and the way its gradual demolition of public services built up over generations, so it can feed the remains into barrel fires and convince itself this is "growth".

I'm guessing you all believe in bridges too, right? I've got one to sell you if you're willing to drop that $100 in a bank account for me ...

> It is a supply and demand curve. Where they meet is the equilibrium.

Academic economists like Steve Keen have totally demolished the classic supply/demand curve: https://unlearningeconomics.wordpress.com/2012/06/25/debunki...

Here's a suitably scornful graphical version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3wUqcapSU4

> Just look at what happened to online gambling 10 years ago.

And not a moment too soon. Gambling games are designed to be addictive, to bypass the judgment and decision-making centres in people's brains, and take their money. Providing places to go and gamble is one thing; people who walk in there ought to know they will probably lose every bean they walk in there with, so there's informed consent. Putting gambling games that accept real money on the web is effectively like putting coin-operated pokie machine in every living room (and these days every pocket) with a net connection. It's profoundly exploitative and totally deserved to be starved of financial oxygen IMHO.

I think that would be more like SolarCoin: https://solarcoin.org/

Those who are concerned about this have three options:

* make the effort to learn how to set up and maintain your own instance of your chosen federated social app. You get to decide exactly what data is and isn't shared with the network. You don't depend on the goodwill of any third party , or their security competence (just your own).

* find a geek you know, and get them to host an instance for you. There is a third party, but it's someone you personally know and presumably trust.

* find a public instance run by a collective or organisation you trust to care about your privacy and know how to protect it, eg some people might trust the motives and competence of EFF, or their country's civil liberties organisation (eg ACLU in the US), or a collective like RiseUp.net or Disroot.org.

While export/ import of accounts between instances is an unsolved problem at present (Hubzilla can do it using Nomadic Identity but only between Hubzilla instances), the devs of all the federated apps are aware of it as a major pain point, and work is underway to implement it. In the meantime, if you're willing to go to the trouble of re-following and nagging all your followers to re-follow, you can move between the 3 options above at will. FB and other datafarms offer you none of these options.

EDIT: formatting

Is it possible to do revocable private messages in a decentralized system. My understanding it that the Zot protocol (used by Hubzilla) deals with this by keeping private data on the hub of the user sharing it, while public message can be mirrored to the hubs of any users receiving it. "Sending" a private message (or media file) to another user actually sends a notification to that user that they have permission to access it. When the receiver wants to access the message, their hub has to correctly identify them to the sender's hub, using credentials sent as part of that notification. But all of that is handled in the background, not a painful, confusing manual process users have to know about. See: https://github.com/friendica/friendica/issues/2894#issuecomm...

From what I understand of SSB,it works by distributing messages to receiving users as part of a blockchain, making all messages effectively public, even if not published with the goal of giving the public access. But maybe similar functionality could be added by setting up private "clubs" - pub servers set up by groups of users who know and trust each other - which would play the same role as a Hubzilla hub, storing private messages and displaying them to users who can authenticate correctly.

It boggles the mind that people still have the blissful trust in the security chops of giant corporations. I could give you a long list of well-funded corporations whose servers have been cracked in the last few years (remember Ashley Madison?!?), but I really only need to mention one; GitHub ...

It might also have its own agenda about what news it wants to be considered "real" or "fake".

> Do you believe it is fundamentally wrong for a government -- even with significant public support -- to interfere with one anonymous man's Galtian quest to sell radium toothpaste by mail?

Government? Maybe. Private corporations exploiting the hell out of a natural monopoly? Hell no. Genuinely democratic government (which implies opt-in, or at least the ability to opt-out) sure. That's what standards bodies are for.

Unlike some here, I can see value in user protection laws like the GDPR, for the same reason I see the value in governments creating heavy disincentives for kidnapping or murder. Such laws can, if necessary, be enforced on groups running instances of federated social network software. We saw what happened when the US Congress tried to regulate a major centralized provider; a slap on the wrist with a wet bus ticket: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTv0MZBCQCs

I agree there is a middle ground between policing everything and no guidelines or accountability at all. Every decentralized social networks that's pulled in a user base beyond the friends of the devs has had to deal with how to find consensus around guidelines, and how to deal with Bad Actors. Fortunately, in free code tech, everything we do revolves about rough consensus and running code.

So within a project like Mastodon, they define goals; eg a spam-free network). Then, they theorize mechanisms to implement those goals; eg give users the ability to mute/ block spammers, and give instances the ability to boot spammers, and mute/ block instances infested with spammers. Then they code those features, roll them out, and see if they achieve the goal. Rinse, repeat. Pretty much the same process a centralized open source site like Reddit, Lobste.rs, Minds, or Yours would use.

Things get a bit more complex when Mastodon wants to federate with instances of software other than Mastodon (eg GNU Social). Fortunately in tech, we have other names for consensus and guidelines about inter-operation between different programs implementing similar features; protocols and standards. For example, the W3C Social Web EG got a bunch of folks together from projects that want to federate, and standardized a set of protocols under the name ActivityPub. Because this standard is written by people with experience dealing with Bad Actors in federated networks of their own software, they can share this knowledge, and follow a similar set of steps to those laid out above.

In contrast, FB at al are the worst of both worlds. They have total power to police anything, and the only way to hold them accountable is to abandon your data and your contacts on their platform and opt-out (thus #deletefacebook). They accrue more power and wealth the more users they have spending time on the site (abusively or otherwise), so they do the absolute minimum to hold Bad Actor users accountable, just enough to other users getting driven off the site. See how centralization doesn't really help here?

Yes, UX matters, especially when you are a new platform trying to establish your initial user base. But nothing matters in social software as much as network effect; people want to be where their friends are (and/or where people they want to follow or be noticed by are). Like any social network, Scuttlebutt will grow from the edges, as people already using it onboard their friends and family members.

(I had more to say about this but I posted the longer version on Diaspora instead.)

> Why do you draw this distinction between "instances" and "peers"

I understand why you ask this, but the word "instance" has come to mean the server running something like MediaGoblin or Mastodon (the server in a server/client model), while a "peer" is an end-user device running a P2P app like BitTorrent or ScuttleButt (that is both client and server). P2P networks have their cons, but the major pro for a network not backed by large wads of capital is that they scale as they add users. Server-to-server federated networks using OStatus, Diaspora protocol, Zot, or ActivityPub have to scale by convincing people with scarce sysadmin skills to set up more servers, and figure out how to sustain them (both organizationally and financially).

> My experience is that users really like [retweeting/sharing] features.

Sure, but that doesn't mean every piece of network software needs to have them. They are one of the key tools for abusing The Stacks; post something you want to trend (spam, fake news), get a botnet of zombie users to boost it. Given the way Scuttlebutt transports and stores posts, they would create a lot of extra overhead, and potential for abuse, for no major benefit (people can always cut'n'paste if they really want to reshare).

The Year of The Linux Desktop is certainly coming sooner than the Year of the Windows Mobile ;P

Sure, thinking about user experience and designing user-friendly UI is important. But multi-million dollar UI and the ability to scale without losing performance (due to deep pockets) are the only reasons to use FB, goOgle or any of The Stacks. Once more UX people and graphic designers start working on decentralized, free code apps, and organic growth via community-hosting (userOps) allows them to scale as well as corporate server farms, where does that leave The Stacks?

You do realize Whatsapp is owned by FB, right? so it's a "creepy digital relationship with our grandma" in exactly the same way messaging Grandma on FB is. The key issue here is not whether we use digital comms channels (or telephones, or carrier pidgeons), but whether those comms channels lead us towards getting together in person with our families and friends, or whether they lead us towards spending more ticking clicking around the comms channels. Check out Joe Edelman's videos on Vimeo about human-centred design for a more detailed discussion of this and related issues.

Doesn't sounds like the Diaspora team have any plans to implement AP, which is a shame. Here's a fairly scathing write-up on ActivityPub from a prominent Diaspora dev: https://schub.io/blog/2018/02/01/activitypub-one-protocol-to...

Friendi.ca and Hubzilla can already interoperate with Diaspora using the Diaspora protocol. Here's a good guide to the current landscape of free code, federated social networks here, and which protocols each app supports: https://medium.com/we-distribute/a-quick-guide-to-the-free-n...

Very roughly:

* AP is a decentralized protocol, like email or XMPP, that standardizes federated interactions from server-to-server, and interactions from server-to-client. Sharing data between end users depends on one or more servers.

* SSB is distributed protocol, more like Git or BitTorrent. It has a concept of "pubs" which play a supernode role vaguely similar to that of BitTorrent trackers, or maybe a WebRTC server. Sharing data between users is P2P, not mediated by a server, although the pubs help user locate each other.

EDIT: formatting

> That is just a problem of offering good filters.

True, and this is a solved problem in the fediverse. Mastodon dev team have been particularly good at implementing filtering tools at both the user and instance level (like the email filters that block whole domains used only for spam or other abuse).

We've had a couple of waves of folks banned from the birdsite turn up, get asked to set up their own instances, and after a while, you just stop noticing they're there. It's like a normal after-work drinks pub and a skinhead bar being in the same street. You occasionally walk past some unsavoury characters, but you don't have to interact with them.

> Facebook is sometimes famously called out for creating those filters.

No, what FarceBook and goOgle (among others) are called out for is creating echo chambers, not filters. The difference is subtle but crucial. In a nutshell, filters allow you to mute people who abuse you; spamming, flooding, flaming, dogpiling, sea-lioning, all the old favourites from UseNet/ mailing lists and a few new ones. Echo chambers quietly disappear the opinions of people who may disagree with you, however politely, and regardless of how many peer-reviewed citations they offer. You don't even know its happening, leading to dangerous levels of false consciousness, and uncritical partisanship.

> I'm a facebook kind of guy and I'm not sure what the solution is when everyone else is on facebook.

Somebody was the first person you knew who was on FarceBook, otherwise, from what you're saying, you wouldn't be on there. Be that someone for your network of family and friends, on a user-respecting platform. May the source be with you ;)