In response to this post: https://lemmy.zip/post/22916249
Disclaimer: I understand this community is more geared towards technology news and not someone's scribblings, but I'd like to bring in a different view on the same topic.
I came up with the idea to make this post while discussing something on Lemmy, and I realized that not even that long ago, something like Mastodon was so incredibly niche, even as a developer who likes niche stuff I viewed it as something more like IRC - good for people who want the "old days" back, but no longer fit for the general public.
Over the past year or more, ever since the Reddit API block fiasco began (I was an avid Boost for Reddit user) up until now, the way that I consume social media has changed drastically, huge thanks to the invention of ActivityPub and the Fediverse. I finally understood the importance of actual free speech, not unmoderated, but ungoverned¹ discussions, where even the most outlandish ideas are allowed in niche spaces, but where cheap clickbait and ragebait quickly gets cleaned up by motivated and dedicated members of communities.
As I was reading a comment on some post, the comment had a 😡 emoji in the middle of it. I took a moment to smile and appreciate just how ubiquitous UTF-8 has become, to the point that even your smart pregnancy test would probably be able to display them, in one way or another. Ain't that something?
Not even speaking about the horrible things that happen in the real world, there are also atrocious acts committed even in the tech world, where good ideas like blockchain and cryptocurrency get blown out of proportion, hyped to no end, and implemented atrociously by greedy capitalists looking for a quick buck in any way possible that makes my blood boil. However, as I'm seeing, Facebook, Google and others (at least in the EU) are slowly, but surely being forced to, uhm, not steal and lie and scam people out of their data and privacy? The solution is not perfect, but it is good, and it is pointing us in the right direction.
In conclusion, I don't think the future of digital technology and how we use it is going to be how sci-fi movies imagined, with brain-computer interfaces being a commonplace thing or whatever, at least not in the next 50-100 years in my opinion. I think that shitty NFT art scams are not going to be the next web, Web 3.0 - this is.
For a better future for all, one day at a time! Written with Boost for Lemmy 😉 @rmayayo
¹ Please correct me if I misspoke here, I hope I got my point across.
Personally, I definitely believe crypto really is the future. I know it has been hyped up a lot and that has contributed a lot to the volatility. But beneath all that, real people are building solutions to real-world problems. So much so that even companies like Visa are using crypto like USDC to do international transfers faster and cheaper.
Edit: If nothing else, it significantly reduces settlement time for money in the financial system.
"Crypto is the future" doesn't really mean anything. Anyone can say that and never be wrong, because humans will always be looking towards the future. What I'm interested in is when this future is supposedly arriving. People have been making big claims about this stuff for nearly two decades and it's still pretty irrelevant. Meanwhile CBDCs are actually being developed and rolled out globally. Where is crypto?
There are three countries who have launched a CBDC. They are the Bahamas, China, and Nigeria. And uptake in all three of those places is extremely low. As for the truly decentralized cryptocurrencies, they've been building for the last 15 years and are getting to the point where they are extremely easy to access and use. I remember back when every website had to write their own specific payment gateway to accept crypto and you don't need to do that anymore. Decentralized finance applications are getting more secure over time thanks to audits and hacks of competitors. More liquidity is able to enter without shoving the price around quite so much and so it is becoming more stable over time.
More than 70% of central banks are currently researching and/or designing their own CBDCs.