In theory open source can help you escape subscription hell but Gimp and LibreOffice do not have feature parity with Photoshop and MS Office and have significantly inferior UX. Maybe for word processing, LibreOffice or an older version of Office is fine, but that is not true at all for spreadsheets. So much the case that I would rather use Python Dataframes + Juypter notebooks than LibreOffice Calc.

This is also the case for Indesign vs Scribus, Illustrator vs Inkscape, Autocad vs Freecad. Audacity is fairly powerful but again horrible UX. That list goes on I am sure.

Found this out when I wanted a decent journaling app for Android. All the most popular ones have subscription tiers that amount to hundreds of dollar over just a few years… for a fucking journal app? what the hell!

Look up crisis theory, the rate of profit tends to fall in capitalist systems. Because each company is driven by competitive self-interest, it is incapable of acting for the good of the whole. You simply cannot devote resources to anything but trying to out-compete your rivals and in doing so the profit for everyone tends lower and lower until you have a crisis.

I’m curious

I don’t believe that is accurate. Beside moons (which don’t orbit the sun), Pluto is the largest and closest dwarf planet.

If those are the only options, I am choosing juggalo

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When you have commodity money, the value of the money is derived from the value of the commodity. You don’t get to assign arbitrarily higher values to the money because the market determines the value. But yes, all speculative assets typically have a higher extrinsic value compared with their intrinsic value but I don’t believe that has anything to do with it being a medium of exchange or not. That is just supply and demand.

Gold is a commodity and you can create a currency that is backed by a commodity so you aren’t actually trading the commodity itself.

That is not true, for the vast majority of the history of money it was based on a commodity that was valuable in its own sense. It is only in the last century that we have begun experimenting with currencies that are not pegged to the value of a commodity.

Cryptocurrencies derived their value from being a network of users (metcalfe’s law) so they are more like a commodity money. Thing about something like Meta, which has a valuation in the trillions despite its physical assets not be worth nearly that and its functionality as a website being easily replicated on an alternative platform. The users are what is valuable.

It’s called accelerationism and it is stupid

Hmmm anyone remember when Andrew Yang was running for president and said that data was the new oil and that people should own the content they put on social media?

Sure and people who think you can’t have monetary policy with crypto are too uninformed to be worth discussing the merits of each system.

I’m sure we can all wax lyrical about what we think money is and lord knows whenever cryptocurrency is brought up the armchair currency experts are always there. So thank you for that!

Its not the same thing, its just incrementally more decentralized than the current system but potentially less so then a proof of work one (and even then only in theory, in practice a lot of POS chains are more decentralized than BTC).

But the most important aspect of crypto is actually not decentralization. Decentralization is necessary but only to a point. What is more important is for the cryptocurrency to be permissionless. In that way, you are correct it is replicating a system we already have… cash. It basically taking the properties of cash and bring that into the digital realm. We lost so much when our money and other assets became digital and that it what crypto is trying to give us back. It crazy to me that people don’t want to see that happen and buy into these superficial critiques, which, even if true are just engineering problems that can be overcome.

But I am no stranger to seeing people completely sleep on radical shifts in technology. Hell the fediverse is just like that too and if you leave it for a moment you will see people trashing it in the same way. So whatever, keep your fiat. I hope the future is one where both systems an co-exist.

As opposed to a currency issued and secured by a central bank?

Yes… some with billions of dollars in a crypto has a billion more reasons to want the network secured.

Great place, went there last year to get some kratom while on a short trip to Vancouver. We ended up having a shot of LSD and then we decided to walk back downtown through Chinatown, unaware until that point that it was Chinese new year. Best day of the whole trip!

And let’s be honest, for mainstream consumers, the Linux desktop and the Fediverse are failures.

My point is that just because something doesn’t achieve widespread adoption immediately does not mean it is a failure. I use both Linux desktop and the Fediverse and the fact that they are not in widespread use doesn’t rob them of virtue for the people that use them. Technology adoption is a complex thing and its incredibly reductionist to just say "crypto has been around for a decade and a half and you still can’t use it for anything therefore its a failure. Our legacy financial system is very entrenched and its not to going to unseated overnight. These things take time.

Ultimately I think it should come down to consumer choice, those that prefer centralized finance should use that and those that are OK with the added overheard of decentralized finance should be able to have that choice. That is why I make the analogy to these other systems. Linux desktop for a long time was harder to use but it was worth it for people whose values aligned with open source software. Crypto has a similar trajectory and faces similar uphill battles including negative attitudes from those using competing systems. But for those who value what it provides, it is worth it.

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What you are saying is inaccurate…

1. BTC has a performant layer 2 called lightning. And if layer 2s are not your jam, there are plenty of L1s that can handle 1000s of transactions per second

2. Crypto solves the problem of having a central bank control the money supply. Also having private organizations controlling digital payment rails. Provides options or underbanked people in countries with unstable financial systems. I could go on…

3. Blockchains do not use an enormous amount of energy. You are thinking of the consensus mechanism used by proof of work cryptocurrencies. There are alternative consensus mechanisms that use much less energy

Also the adoption rates are not a measure of utility. The Linux desktop has been around 30 years and has an adoption rate under 5 percent. Mastodon has not grown as fast as twitter did. Democracy is not used by the majority of governments and where it is, voter turnout is low.

Is it also your opinion that these things are bad products?

Decentralized systems just take longer to mature. It’s crazy to me that fediverse users don’t understand this.