The whole article took about a minute to load because apparently it’s being loaded from some decentralized network called lbry.
I would rather be the product and get a great user experience than a shitty user experience that sells itself based on some ideal that probably will not work economically in the long run. If a decentralized network you invested a lot of your life in becomes irrelevant, it’s worse than using a centralized network that actually stays around. And most “decentralized” networks have failed to show enough traction for me to feel secure about their future.
I see the “ipfs less” terminology as similar to the term “serverless”. Just like how serverless still has servers but the point is that you don’t have to maintain your own server, ipfs less does make sense in that you don’t have to run ipfs node to use it. But also just like how many people hate the term serverless, ipfs less will be hated by many as well. I guess at the end of the day what’s important is whether something provides value, and I think this is pretty cool technology in that sense. Just my two cents…
How would you know which stock photo was used for training? Someone may take a whole bunch of images they buy on a dark market, create a huge train model, and dump it on the public internet over torrent or something. And there would be no way to know which images were used to train the model
They will have to sell if the Bitcoin price goes down enough that their measly revenue from their obscure enterprise software can't cover the loss from their Bitcoin investment.
He can keep holding, but it will lower the morale of the employees as well as himself. Unless you think Microstrategy has completely become a hedge fund, they have products to build and they will even lose what's left of their customers if things go bad. You really think the guy can keep holding when he lost hundreds of millions of dollars through BTC? (At the moment he's still in the positive even after the crash, but I'm talking about when it goes down further) Also he can and likely will get into trouble with the SEC when things get bad.
If BTC price doesn't recover soon and falls further, Microstrategy is what will kill BTC. I don't know why BTC investors are so crazy about Microstrategy buying BTC (This would have never happened back in the early days of Bitcoin), but if BTC price goes down further, Microstrategy will be forced to sell their BTC by their shareholders. Otherwise the Microstrategy stock itself will crash. Also when Microstrategy loses too much money, they may finally have to shut down because they borrowed so much money from people just to buy BTC.
When Microstrategy crashes, along with them, the public sentiment for BTC will go to shit, and that will cause the crash of BTC itself since the whole recent price climb was based on the "institutions are buying up BTC" narrative. This is the scariest scenario. Once the downward spiral happens it will be unstoppable, it will be like the crash Mt. Gox caused, but like 100 times harsher.
What Osaka did has nothing to do with ambition, she did it because of the changing landscape of the media. Unlike the old days where athletes had to rely on press conferences to get their story out, nowadays they can directly broadcast their messages through their social media like Twitter, Instagram, TikTok or whatever, and shape the message JUST THE WAY THEY WANT, instead of getting tricked by sketchy reporters to be quoted in uncontrollable ways.
The author starts from this completely incorrect assumption (based on her own personal bias) and then writes a whole article about how people "should not be ambitious", which is her true agenda. Osaka has nothing to do with this writer's agenda, the writer simply "used" Osaka as a tool for her own agenda.
Ironically, this kind of idiotic "journalism" is EXACTLY why people like Osaka decide to not deal with the press. There's nothing to gain by giving these people the power to put words in their mouth, just to write articles that they were already going to write, only using you as a narrative tool and often times hurting your reputation to achieve their agenda.
And no, ambition is NOT a cult. It's the main reason why the humanity was able to evolve as fast as they did, and it IS a virtue. It's not for everyone, but telling people to get rid of their professional ambition while writing that on the NYTimes to promote themselves (ambition) is the most hypocritical thing ever.
It's kinda funny how this whole drama is for copying some "intellectual property" that anyone can easily build.
If you don't want your virtual cloud sandbox app to be copied easily, build something that actually is novel. For example see Stackblitz https://stackblitz.com/ I think they're going to completely destroy all these Replit-like models.
> However, decentralized immutability means that nothing can be done should an unintended action occur with your account.
All that's needed is an elegant identity system that privately ties identity with transactions so that only the stakeholders can share their transactions while the ledger itself is public.
That way "Decentralized Immutability" can co-exist with mutability through law in case something terrible happens. You don't need to change the history, you simply need to make a court order to create an additional transaction that reverts the disaster. Just like how when a hacker gets caught stealing money, they are forced to send the money back (additional transaction) instead of deleting the original stealing transaction from the bank account and rewriting as if nothing happened.
The thing is, pseudo-Turing complete blockchains like Ethereum (and all EVM-like blockchains) are not really fit for this purpose because the entire logic is on chain. UTXO based blockchains like Bitcoin is optimized for this since each transaction can act as evidence trail.
> This isn’t inherent to PoW consensus. In 2010, Bitcoin was CPU mineable on any ordinary Windows PC. It wasn’t until Bitcoin commanded a significant market value — which wasn’t guaranteed in the slightest — that industrial scale mining operations came into the foray.
This is inherent to the PoW consensus. Satoshi Nakamoto himself even said Bitcoin would end up in data centers because of this property. It's not that hard to understand why this would be the case. PoW is powered by competition, and competition begets scale, just like any other industry.
> Your understanding of censorship resistance is gravely mistaken [1]:
Before making this kind of condescending comments, maybe make sure that you are not the one who's misunderstanding what I am saying? I was talking about what many PoS supporters think, not what I thought. Go ahead and re-read what I said.
Their (The PoS supporters) idea is that "because it's much more difficult to find PoS validators than PoW miners because PoW miners need to maintain a factory whereas PoS validators can just hide in their mom's basement and make money, it's more difficult for the governments to regulate PoS than PoW". And my point was that that was an incorrect belief.
My entire post was talking about this false sense of "censorship resistance", basically Pro-PoW and anti-PoS, and you didn't need to lecture me on your superior understanding of PoW. I understand everything you said, but you completely misunderstood my point. If you didn't get that by reading, maybe it's your reading comprehension problem.
"If a greedy attacker is able to
assemble more CPU power than all the honest nodes, he would have to choose between using it
to defraud people by stealing back his payments, or using it to generate new coins. He ought to
find it more profitable to play by the rules, such rules that favour him with more new coins than
everyone else combined, than to undermine the system and the validity of his own wealth."
Unlike Proof of Work based blockchains which require seizable factory infrastructure to break even, Proof of Stake doesn't need one.
Most Proof of Stake supporters see this as a good thing because it means there's no electricity waste and higher degree of "censorship resistance".
However what will actually happen is this "censorship resistance" is what will make the PoS blockchain as a whole get "censored", ironically.
Proof of Work blockchains, while wasting a lot of energy, can be regulated easily because the government can simply regulate the large miners in their countries. However Proof of Stake, because it can't be traced easily, the regulators will have to try to stop the entire blockchain as a whole.
Of course, it's impossible to completely stop it, but the governments can do a lot of things in their "anti-decentralized tech playbook" to make sure the adoption never goes mainstream. (See Tor, BitTorrent, etc.)
Maybe I'm missing something, but there is already the term "append only logs" which we use everywhere. How is this different from append only logs? Append only logs rely on cryptography to make the history transparent too. I skimmed through the website but couldn't find a distinction.
Also, the website format is kinda weird. As I reach the bottom of the page, it looks like this is a promotional site for Trillian. Maybe the confusion comes from here. What is this site really about?
Netlify CMS stores content on their cloud. This looks like it lets you store on your own git repository directly from the browser, avoiding potential lock-in.
Very cool. Every existing criticism about static site generators seems to be gone with this approach. Many interesting ideas in there, like the service worker instead of cloud, and an actual git flow in the browser. Looks almost like more than just a static site generator. This could get rid of the cloud itself.
Interesting. I had no idea. So you're saying all the podcasters are hosting their audios on their own self-hosted server instead of using a 3rd party podcast hosting provider?
They do NOT work in magazines and newspapers. That's why they are going out of business. And that's why all the larger media companies are coming online and ditching offline versions.
I don't think we disagree on any of the facts you suggested. Obviously you need to win the platform if you want to be successful. You're interpreting from business point of view and I'm interpreting from macro economical view. And in this view, every human activity revolves around money. If something is not economical, each economic actor will leave, and the technology will lose out. Of course, on a lower level there's user experience, network effects, etc. but on a more fundamental level if you think of the entire world as a network of human value transactions, it does become mostly about money what people spend their time on (with opportunity costs and all)
> FB won because FB was where people posted and read posts. No one even knew that facebook would be such a great ad platform at that point
FB got traction because it was free. If they charged for posting it would have lost to some other service.
And during the early days FB survived because they raised money from VCs, and the VCs thought that there WILL be ways to make money if they got tons of users somehow.
If FB was some drug dealing, child trafficking service, then VCs wouldn't have put money into it. Even if we don't go that far, we can just look at music tech industry to see how this applies. Investors really got burned by Napster and never wanted to invest in a music tech company anymore because they knew it was a difficult industry to make money in.
Imagine how many people will be building web services if it was guaranteed that nobody made any money from it. That's why I keep saying it's all about money.
But I get your point, and I will compromise with you and say it's not "all" about money but "mostly" about money. After all, people build these web services in hopes of making money. That's why they form corporations (corporation's main function is to make money)
> Podcasts are the best example. They were the way to distribute certain content. Users adopted podcasts because the content was there, even though the UX was/is clunky. It happened to be decentralized and rss-based.
I would argue that podcasts are as decentralized as emails are "decentralized". When was the last time you downloaded a Podcast from a self-hosted server? Most people download podcasts through iTunes, SoundCloud, etc. because...centralizing makes sense economically. In this environment, RSS is virtually meaningless because the whole point of RSS was to have an open standard in a world where everyone ran their own RSS servers. Once it becomes centralized you're better off just distributing content as a centralized feed like Twitter.
> The fact that podcasts work better economically for content makers than youtube... that was incidental.
Nothing's "incidental". There are always reasons behind everything. Let's dig in further to see what's going on. When was the last time you've sat through a shitty Podcast that's 1 hour long? You probably haven't. Now think of how long most Podcasts are. Yes, they are mostly "long-form" content that are 30 minutes to 1 hour long.
Now think about the last YouTube video you watched. How long was it? Probably like 3 minutes to 5, or maybe you watch a conference livestream or tutorial that's 1 hour long, but those are exceptions. Most people go to YouTube to watch bite sized videos. This is why ads don't work as well on Youtube compared to Podcasts. Why would you watch a 30 second ad just to watch a 2 minute video? Naturally, if you have the same content, people will watch the videos WITHOUT ads. And this is where the "race to the bottom" begins.
So are Podcasts absolutely superior to videos? No. Podcasts have their own drawbacks. Because Podcasts are long form content, listeners don't want to end up wasting their precious 1 hour. Therefore it's really hard as a podcast publisher to get people to listen to their podcast. Which means initial "acquisition" is much harder for Podcasts compared to YouTube. But once you "acquire" the listeners it's worth it because they have "chosen" to listen to you on an on-going basis. Which is why I asked earlier when was the last time you sat through a shitty podcast. It is much harder to build an audience for a Podcast compared to Youtube, you really need to be able to produce super high quality content.
My point is, these different types of medium each have pros and cons. But there are always very good reasons if you look behind the scenes. Nothing is "incidental". And again, this all comes down to money.
I would rather be the product and get a great user experience than a shitty user experience that sells itself based on some ideal that probably will not work economically in the long run. If a decentralized network you invested a lot of your life in becomes irrelevant, it’s worse than using a centralized network that actually stays around. And most “decentralized” networks have failed to show enough traction for me to feel secure about their future.