You don't have to do anything with crypto, it just supports crypto integration if you want to tip other users. Just like reddit did. It's an optional feature.
But people already have Paypal and understand how to use it. Most people don’t understand cryptocurrency, and don’t want anything to do with it because of its association with scams.
At one point they didn't, and they had to sign up and learn how to use it. But your critique is fair. It's an optional feature, you don't have to use it. The benefit from the platform perspective is that the fees are stupid low so micropayments can work well. Like 1c on $5 low. And it makes it easier to do the payments internationally. Microtransaction tips really couldn't be done with Paypal or really any other competitive non-crypto system.
Also, I looked in to Nostr a bit for this and do you seriously think profile links like this will catch on with people?
The nostr username schema isn't great. There's a couple protocol proposals to simplify them, they will look a lot more like username@website.com in the future. AP currently is doing way better at this. I'll add this to the list in the post of places where AP is better.
I'm sorry Ada, but you're just wrong here. I don't know how you are missing my bolded sections explaining how nostr and AP work identically here.
By your own admission, this doesn’t happen though. One relay is the same as the other, and that’s because the bigot can just use multiple relays as well, making the effort of an admin blocking them largely a waste of time
Every relay sets their own moderation policy. They can block users, they can delete posts, they can filter based on keywords. They can block other relays and "de-federate" from them. Relays can share lists of common servers to de-federate from because they host bigots. Same as AP. Early in mastodon/lemmy/etc relays didn't differentiate themselves much on moderation policies. As problems came up on some servers, they started to do that more, now there is a big difference between different instances. Same can and will happen on nostr, there is already some differentiation, just not as much as it's a smaller platform.
They can’t though, because on AP, an instance that constantly spawns bigots with throw away accounts gets defederated, and that means that bigots have a barrier that doesn’t exist on Nostr.
Same thing happens in Nostr, that relay will get defederated. A bigot can still post to that relay, but their posts won't be propagated to other relays. All the bigots will filter into the few relays that allow them to post. Same as AP.
But user have to be technically minded enough, and willing, to set up a crypto wallet to do this.
True. That would be true of any platform which allows tips, you'd have to connect to some source of money whether it be paypal or crypto. Paypal's fees would be prohibitively expensive but it would be theoretically doable. Either way, it's a <5 minute setup process if they care to do it.
Interesting I didn't know AP supported E2E. I guess it's Mastodon that doesn't support that element of the AP protocol then?
If you as a user can connect to multiple relays, then most people will do that, making the act of an admin banning a bigot on one relay pointless, because the bigot will still get through on other relays
Just like AP, the bigot can join another instance/relay, if an instance has bad moderation policy, your relay can block that instance/relay entirely.
Which means most admins won’t bother acting except in the most egregious cases, leaving it up to the users to deal with their own blocks.
Admins can block along any spectrum of severity they want, just like AP.
once they’re blocked on enough relays, they’ll just make another throw away account.
They can do this in AP too. There's no way to solve this unless we start requiring a passport photo with every account or a payment or something. Blocking naughty instances/relays that have weak moderation is the best solution atm.
Nostr does not reduce an instance admin's ability to block bigots or the relays that host bigots. None of that is different than AP.
The default setup for snort (most popular nostr portal) blocks all crypto-related discussion by default. The crypto bro problem was apparently worse back in the early launch days, but it's gotten much better.
On AP, because identities are tied to instances, the instance admin can kick the bigot and they’re gone for everyone, before many folk ever see it. And if there is an instance with admins that don’t deal with bigots, the admins can defederate from the entire instance.
Same with Nostr. Relay admins can ban users and relays who don't have good moderation. The difference is, if you don't agree with that ban, as a user you can: connect to other relays and route around it (so you can still follow/be followed by/DM your person/relay of choice) AND keep using that original relay because you like the content on it (if they banned another user, not if they banned you). And there's no need to make a whole new account at another instance, login to it separately, etc.
In Nostr, your relay gets to make and enforce it's own content policies just as easily as it does on AP. They are literally the same in this regard.
Agreed. I'm glad to see both protocols growing. By "win" I mean: become the most popular twitter replacement.
This is exactly why I won’t use Nostr. What you’re describing here isn’t ideal for many folk that are part of marginalised groups. When each individual has to individually block every bigot only after being exposed to their bigotry, then the vulnerable folk don’t hang around. This is doubly the case when there is nothing stopping the bigots from just creating another account after burning their first one.
In Nostr, each relay can set its own policies. Relays can and do establish policies for acceptable behaviours. If you want a strict content policy, connect to relays with strict policies. You won't have to individually block any users or relays/instances. This is essentially the same as mastodon. The difference with nostr is that you normally connect to multiple relays, so a single relay, where your identity is tied to, cannot block you from following who you want and seeing whatever content you choose. Let's say Relay A blocks a user you want to follow. No problem, you are connected to relay B and C that don't. And, of course, if for some reason you only want to connect to a single relay, you can.
This is also something that activitypub communities do better, because they are communities not relays.
"Hope our commmunity of users donate" didn't work out well for the previous iteration of P2P discussion spaces: forums. The fact is, hosting online discussion forums gets costly quickly, especially if you want them to be reliable. Hell, even IRC servers which serve only text can get expensive to host. I'm not saying there's no way to convince users to donate to valuable instances, just saying that as a general strategy for FOSS it hasn't worked particularly well.
Add nostr to your list of platforms to try. It's basically mastodon except:
- Your identity is not tied to your instance. So if your instance closes, you don't lose your followers, DMs, etc
- Your instance can't block you from following anybody else, same in the other direction
- DMs are encrypted, your instance admin can't read them
Nostr is its own protocol, it doesn't talk natively with mastodon/lemmy/kbin/etc. But it is a federated protocol, so in addition to a twitter clone it has a YouTube clone and other kinds of platforms on it, and they can all talk to each other.
I use nostr and mastodon. IMO Nostr is going to win. It does everything mastodon does but without tying identity to an instance, I think that is really important.
The problem isn't that Bitcoin uses a lot of energy. The problem is that people never consider that energy use in context. Yet any headline about Bitcoin and energy never provides that context, because they are essentially hit pieces designed to elicit anger and clicks. Instead, we have to ask: What does that energy get us? How does that energy use compare to the energy used by other systems which perform the same function? A car which gets 10 miles per gallon would have been a fantastic use of energy in 1953, but today it is seen as wasteful. It does the same underlying thing, but the context matters.
Historically, our currencies have been based on incredibly inequitably distributed resources: precious metals and stable governance. Bitcoin is based on energy, which is the most equitably distributed resource on the planet. It literally falls from the sky, it runs through every river and every gust of wind and is found in the earth's crust as uranium. Sometimes we get energy from unsustainable places, it sucks that any industry (including Bitcoin) uses it. That is a policy and governance problem, not a problem of our monetary system. You should know that Bitcion miners flock to renewable energy sources and over-provisioned grids. Why? Because they need the cheapest energy possible, which tends to come from renewables. Bitcoin miners are "buyers of last resort", if there was anybody else to buy that energy, they would have bought it, and miners would have been outbid, because miners can't afford to pay high energy prices as they must compete with every other miner on the planet. This is why Bitcoin mines typically don't operate during peak demand hours, which is where most fossil fuels are used. Bitcoin, as "buyers of last resort" can be a part of the green revolution, they make it easier for governments to invest in and over-provision renewable infrastructure, and they make that green energy cheaper for everybody else by ensuring that at least someone will buy it during times of low demand. The problem with renewables is that they produce all day whereas people only actually want energy a few times a day.
Energy use is critical for the security of the Bitcoin network. While schemes that don't use energy have been proposed, they all suffer from some serious trade-offs that make them unsuitable if we are going to build a global reserve currency, including a tendency to cause centralization and to reward the system's richest participants. If a way is found to avoid using energy while still providing the same level of security and decentralization, Bitcoin is absolutely capable of upgrading its own network to use that new way.
First, let's look at what Bitcoin does in exchange for that energy: Bitcoin is an economic network that can be accessed by anybody with a cellphone and a halfway reliable internet connection including the billions of people, with a B, who are "unbanked" because they lack access to stable banking infrastructure. It enables anybody (with Bitcoin lightning) to send money internationally in under a second for pennies in fees. Having a settlement time for transactions of basically zero means that in an economy money can move faster. That means increased efficiency for any industry including the banking industry. It also offers us a way to opt out of an unsustainable inflationary currency environment, that is valuable to people as well. Constantly increasing the supply of money robs the money of value, it hurts the lower and middle classes the most. Bank runs happen, and banks are "too big to fail", so we have to bail them out, which is how the 99% end up paying for the investment risks of the 1%, the system is deeply flawed. But there is no solution to the bailout problem, if our entire economy will collapse if we don't do the bailout, we have to do the bailout, right?
Second, let's look at how much energy that takes. Bitcoin currently does this with less than 1% of global electricity usage. Even if it doesn't replace banking entirely, even if it only replaces remittance services (think PayPal, Western Union, etc). Think of every Western Union kiosk, branch, etc in the entire globe. Think of their lights, their servers, their call centers. How much energy is that? How much energy is used by SWIFT? PayPal? When you start adding these up, you find that we use well over this amount of electricity on remittance services. And we're not just waiting electricity and earth's resources, we're wasting the most valuable assets of all: time and human capital. We don't need people manually sending bank wires like it's 1910. We can have those people doing more valuable jobs.
Bitcoin's market cap is around 850 billion right now. That is bigger than the entire GDP of Sweden or Israel or Vietnam, it's in the top 25 countries by GDP. It transfers trillions of dollars of transactions every year. The average trend, year on year, is wider adoption and growth. It solves real problems and people recognize it and use it for that purpose. That's why big banks, hedge funds, and others invest in it.
There is also the wider discussion to be had about predicating our economies on currencies which grow to infinity and how that may not be a sustainable strategy on a planet with non-infinite resources. A currency which is constantly losing value incentivizes people to spend even if they don't actually need anything, because the currency is going to become worthless given enough time. This means more production is paid for than we actually need. More resources get used up. A deflationary currency, on the other hand, incentivizes the opposite. In a deflationary economic system, somebody producing a good or service must do more to make you want to buy it. In that environment, might products be more reliable? More repairable? Might they be built more sustainably? One can only speculate, but I personally feel positive about the knock-on effects of moving off an inflationary currency system.
Torrents won because of search. Each torrent site maintained an index of torrents and you could search that index. Nobody could pollute the index with nonsense entries because the index was curated by the site admins.
There was no good way to search ed2k or gnutella or the other P2P systems. There were many independent indexes (hosted by nodes) like Torrents, but they were not curated by any trusted custodian. Anybody could publish an index, and your client would fetch all nearby indexes and search through it. These indexes, because they were not curated by trusted custodians, and because there was no cost to publishing a list with a bunch of nonsense in it, lead to a terrible spam-filled search experience.
Federation is great when you have multiple repositories of information and users choose which repository they prefer. That's what Torrent search sites did. If you need a single repository that is in sync for all users and is curated in a P2P manner and you can't trust all participants of that system to be "good actors", that is where you need a system like blockchain, there is no other decentralized way to solve that problem.
I wrote a lengthier post about federation vs blockchain as data storage and reputation mechanisms if you are interested https://lemmy.ml/comment/8051480